| Summary: | 碩士 === 輔仁大學 === 圖書資訊學系 === 92 === Library professionals in the information age need to provide user-friendly information environments. To accomplish this, more detailed knowledge is needed about the information behavior of users. University students are frequent Internet users. However, the web searching behavior of university students was not well-studied in the library literature. Therefore, the purpose of the study was to investigate university students'' web searching behaviors from the cognitive, physical, and affective perspectives. It explored these users'' behavior as they used World Wide Web search engine/directory to find the correct answer to a fact-finding task. Prior experience in using the web/computer was also studied in order to find out its influences on the searching behavior. Fifteen students from Fu-Jen Catholic University participated in the study. Their physical behaviors were captured using Lotus ScreenCam97, a Windows-based software package that captures and replays activities recorded in web browsers. Most of their cognitive behaviors were captured via an interview and parts of them were captured via the same software. And then their affective states were obtained by personal interviews.
This study found that university students have poor knowledge of choosing search engines and using Boolean Logic, and students'' problems with web searching included: Internet transfer speed was slow, web pages show error messages easily, and search systems were out of order. Although there are numerous resources on the World Wide Web, this research still found that university students only browse and link to a few resources to satisfy their information needs. And in this study, university students would present uneasy, depressed and non-confident feelings when they didn''t find proper information in the search process. Furthermore, this study also found that searchers who find the correct answer did not have more web experience than the others. According to research findings, this study also provided suggestions to designers of web sites and search engines, librarians, and future researchers.
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